Tast’in Fives project has officially been launched.

We waited  for so long because  our partner Soreli had to secure a 1800 m² spot inside the Fives Cail brownfield, called “l’Avant-Goût”.  This place, located in the heart of the once closed walls of the Fives Cail brownfield, will constitute our project premises, which will include working, cooking and eating spaces, and an urban farm.

Watch the video here.

Goal #1: Get the neighbours in.

The day of the event, we intended to disseminate as much as possible, the idea that the project was made FOR the inhabitants, and WITH the inhabitants.

So we organized a great “banquet”, open to everyone, on the site of the future project. To take part of the event, free to everyone, people had to contribute to the project by bringing “gifts” for the kitchen such as: plates, cooking books, robots, cutlery, … the result: more than 500 hosts brought much more than we expected!

We also decided to jointly work with a local association that organises every year a popular event for children called “La Fête des Familles”. We invited them to organize their annual event at the “Avant-Goût”, a sort of secret place that no one had seen before the Kick-off. The attractiveness of the event brought a lot of visitors from the neighbourhood, and gave it in a formal and relax atmosphere.

500 participants in the rehabilitated brownfield of Fives Cail

Goal # 2: explain the project in a simple way and collect ideas

Knowing that the event would gather hundreds of people, it was necessary to take this event as an opportunity to adapt our communication, in order to explain the project in a simple and understandable way. So the several elements of our complex project (shared kitchen to be used by community families, professional kitchen, video space with proper equipment, vertical urban farm and a food court) were presented separately, through pedagogical panels.

Every element was presented by a member of the project partnership through a very practical workshop: fruit brochette with Les Sens du Goût for instance, to present the shared kitchen for families; or a vegetable stop-motion projected on a plate with Rencontres Audiovisuelles to explain the future kitchen studio… at the end, the participants were asked about their idea of the best “recipe” for the TAST’in Fives project, so once made thy could take the organic vegetable soup into a  stamped bottle.

Goal # 3: have all the partners involved in a collective action

Although the UIA partnership has a very regular monthly meeting, no common action gathering all 11 partners had been organized yet. The implication of all of them in a very down-to-earth activity implied a strong coordination and an accelerated rhythm of operational meetings.

The result met our expectation, while offering a very diverse and very specialized offer of workshops under the common banner of UIA’s “common kitchen”. Mixed with leisure activities by “Fêtes des Familles”, our stands were all popular among the children thanks to a small “passport” that enabled them to earn goodies for the number of stamps collected in all the stands.

With Les Sens du Goût, explaining the idea of a “shared kitchen for families”

Why did we wait so long?

Explaining an innovative project is a hard task, especially when it comes to ask practical ideas, suggestions, and personal implication of the public. This is why we had worked on a prefiguration site nearby the place where our project will be built. This space became accessible to the public recently, thus it is still unfinished. The opportunity of the kick off was used to unveil this new place, and to start collecting volunteers for a participative co-design workshops.

Discovering the project and the brownfield through l’Avant-Goût.